Chapter 5 - The Coincidence of Contraries and Noh Drama

Summary

Chapter 5 extends the previous chapter’s exploration of Beckett’s embrace of contradiction into the domain of the dynamic blend of contraries, among which, laughter and weeping and, most insistently, birth and death in their consonance with philosophical thought of the East and West. Further examined are Beckett’s adoption of the posthumous voice in his four postwar nouvelles of 1946 and his subsequent fictions and dramas. The chapter argues that thelife-in-death ghostliness of Beckett's spectral voices and the harrowing tales they tell to attain peace in the mind are analogous to the Buddhist purgatorial dramas of Japanese dream noh. This art form, it is claimed, provided a channel for Beckett’s indirect postwar witnessing. Beginning with the nouvelles, the chapter introduces Beckett’s vision of an ‘elsewhere’ or ‘a way out’, further pursued in the 1961 radio play Cascando, staging the author’s mind fashioning the play and distilling the postwar fiction’s explorations of an ‘elsewhere’, a topos taken up by the imaginative cylinder-world of Le Dépeupleur / The Lost Ones of 1970.